Lester Chan’s WordPress Plugins

WordPress 2.5 has been delayed till 17th March 2008 tentatively. I find the development cycle for WordPress 2.5 is a little weird.

For WordPress 2.3 and other previous versions of WordPress, betas and RCs are released first. For example, WP 2.3: Beta 1, WP 2.3: Beta 2, WP 2.3: Beta 3 and lastly WP 2.3: RC 1 are released first before WP 2.3 went gold.

For WordPress 2.5, there are so such releases (I am not talking about SVN nightly) and apparently the upcoming WP 2.5 will be the first and gold release.

Personally, I think they should release the betas and RCs officially first before releasing the gold version to the public.

But I still hope it get further delayed till my summer holidays so I can release it together with my plugins as I am too busy with school that I could not even take any time off to do my plugins.

WordPress 2.3.3 has been released and this release includes a security fix (xmlrpc.php) and 3 minor bug fixes.
3 bug fixes as follows (Ctrl C + Ctrl V from WordPress Trac):

• gettext fails to determine byteorder on 64bit systems with php5.2.1
• some registration emails fail in 2.3.1 b/c of “callout verification”
• maybe_create_table call to config.php issue

5 files changed (Thanks to whooami):

• /wp-admin/install-helper.php
• /wp-includes/gettext.php
• /wp-includes/pluggable.php
• /wp-includes/version.php
• /xmlrpc.php

Get WordPress 2.3.3 now.

WordPress 2.3.2 has been released and this release includes a number of changes including one security fix.

• Performance improvements for post sanitization when raw content is required.
• Changes to is_admin() to ensure that it is only true for admin pages thereby protecting against exposing draft posts.
• Suppression of database errors unless WP_DEBUG is true.
• Check for valid database connection information during install and display and error if the install fails due to database rights.
• Support for a custom database down page to be displayed on database connection errors.
• Changes to make sure we are more selective in what we make clickable, this introduces different rules for different uri types.
• Changes to wp-mail.php to escape the error messages when displaying them to avoid a possible XSS attack.
• Changes to ensure that the post password is only exposed by the xmlrpc method metaWeblog.getRecentPosts to users with rights to edit a post.
• Changes to the information exposed the wp.getAuthors xmlrpc method to reduce the information exposed and add a capabilites check.
• Addition of extra capabilites checks to xmlrpc methods.
• Addition of extra capabilites checks to APP server.
• Changes to validate_file() to improve its traversal attempt detection when running on windows.

Get yours today.

WordPress 2.3.1 has been released and this fix is a bug-fix and security release for the 2.3 series.

An XSS issue has been fixed here:

A security fix to ensure that edit-post-rows.php cannot be directly loaded to prevent XSS attacks when register_globals is enabled

Get yours today.

As promised, I have release updates to 12 of my plugins and added 2 new plugins. All of them are compatible with WordPress 2.3 but not all of them are backward compatible with WordPress 2.1 or 2.2.

The 2 new plugins are WP-DownloadManager and WP-PluginsUsed. As the name of the plugins suggest, WP-DownloadManager simply enhanced your WordPress by adding a simple download manager to it. WP-PluginsUsed will displays both active and inactive plugins that you are using in your WordPress blog.

Be sure to read the readme.html and checkout the changelog for more information and most importantly NOTE THE TABS AT THE TOP

2 New Plugins:
WP-DownloadManager 1.00
» Compatible With WordPress 2.2, 2.3
» Readme/Changelog
» Demo
» Download Mirror #1
» Download Mirror #2
» Support Forum

WP-PluginsUsed 1.00
» Compatible With WordPress 2.1, 2.2, 2.3
» Readme/Changelog
» Demo
» Download Mirror #1
» Download Mirror #2
» Support Forum

12 Updated Plugins:
WP-Ban 1.20
» Compatible With WordPress 2.1, 2.2, 2.3
» Readme/Changelog
» Download Mirror #1
» Download Mirror #2
» Support Forum

WP-DBManager 2.20
» Compatible With WordPress 2.1, 2.2, 2.3
» Readme/Changelog
» Download Mirror #1
» Download Mirror #2
» Support Forum

WP-EMail 2.20
» Compatible With WordPress 2.3
» Readme/Changelog
» Demo
» Download Mirror #1
» Download Mirror #2
» Support Forum

WP-PageNavi 2.20
» Compatible With WordPress 2.1, 2.2, 2.3
» Readme/Changelog
» Demo
» Download Mirror #1
» Download Mirror #2
» Support Forum

WP-Polls 2.21
» Compatible With WordPress 2.3
» Readme/Changelog
» Demo
» Download Mirror #1
» Download Mirror #2
» Support Forum

WP-PostRatings 1.20
» Compatible With WordPress 2.3
» Readme/Changelog
» Demo
» Download Mirror #1
» Download Mirror #2
» Support Forum

WP-PostViews 1.20
» Compatible With WordPress 2.3
» Readme/Changelog
» Demo
» Download Mirror #1
» Download Mirror #2
» Support Forum

WP-Print 2.20
» Compatible With WordPress 2.1, 2.2, 2.3
» Readme/Changelog
» Demo
» Download Mirror #1
» Download Mirror #2
» Support Forum

WP-RelativeDate 1.20
» Compatible With WordPress 2.1, 2.2, 2.3
» Readme/Changelog
» Demo
» Download Mirror #1
» Download Mirror #2
» Support Forum

WP-Sticky 1.10
» Compatible With WordPress 2.1, 2.2, 2.3
» Readme/Changelog
» Demo
» Download Mirror #1
» Download Mirror #2
» Support Forum

WP-Stats 2.20
» Compatible With WordPress 2.3
» Readme/Changelog
» Demo
» Download Mirror #1
» Download Mirror #2
» Support Forum

WP-Useronline 2.20
» Compatible With WordPress 2.3
» Readme/Changelog
» Demo
» Download Mirror #1
» Download Mirror #2
» Support Forum

WordPress 2.3 has been released and I have updated this site to it without any problems.

Copy + Paste from Development Blog

1. Native tagging support allows you to use tags in addition to categories on your post, if you so choose. We’ve included importers for the Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins so if you’ve already been using a tagging plugin you can bring your data into the new system. The tagging system is also wicked-fast, so your host won’t mind.
2. Our new update notification lets you know when there is a new release of WordPress or when any of the plugins you use has an update available. It works by sending your blog URL, plugins, and version information to our new api.wordpress.org service which then compares it to the plugin database and tells you what the latest and greatest is you can use.
3. We’ve cleaned up URLs a bunch in a feature we call canonical URLs which does things like enforce your no-www preference, redirect posts with changed slugs so a link never goes bad, redirect URLs that get cut off in emails on similar to the correct post, and much more. This helps your users, and it also helps your search engine optimization, as search engines like for each page to be available in one canonical location.
4. Our new pending review feature will be great for multi-author blogs. It allows authors to submit a post for review by an editor or administrator, where before they would just have to save a draft and hope someone noticed it.
5. There is new advanced WYSIWYG functionality (we call it the kitchen sink button) that allows you to access some features of TinyMCE that were previously hidden.
6. Full and complete Atom 1.0 support, including the publishing protocol.
7. We’re using the new jQuery whis is “800% faster.”
8. Behind the user-facing tags system is a really kickass taxonomy system which, which adds a ton of flexibility. It’s probably the biggest schema upgrade since version 1.5.
9. The importers have been revamped to be more memory efficient, and you can now add an importer through a plugin.
10. Through hooks and filters you can now override the update system, the dashboard RSS feeds, the feed parser, and tons more than you could in 2.2.
11. The new $wpdb->prepare() way of doing SQL queries.
12. Finally there were over 351 tickets in Trac closed for this release, with over a hundred people contributing. This is the polish, the hundreds of tiny bug fixes and features that make WordPress what it is.

More detailed changes can be found in WordPress Codex.

For those who want the latest development version of my plugins to go along with WordPress 2.3, do the following:

1. Go to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/profile/GamerZ
2. Choose the plugins you want
3. Click “Other Versions” (If you can’t find this link, just click on “Download Plugin”)
4. Scroll down to the “Other Versions” section
5. Click on “Development Version”

The development version should be the final version that I will release unless some last minute bug comes out.

I intend to officially release the final version a few days after WordPress 2.3 goes out the door instead of along side with the release of WordPress 2.3.

WordPress 2.3 RC1 has been released. 1 more week till WordPress 2.3 goes out of the door.

- Download WordPress 2.3 RC1

WordPress 2.3 Beta 3 has been released, but this time I think I will wait for the RC which is due next Monday before updating this site.

- Download WordPress 2.3 Beta 3

Someone reported to me that WP-Email is not working on this site, and after some checking, I also found out that WP-Print is also not working due to the extra / that WordPress generates for wp-print and wp-email permalink structure in WP 2.3.

WP-EMail has another problem which took me 4 hours just go pin-point it. Apparently when it includes wp-email.php and in wp-email.php there is a add_filter(’the_title’) which hooks onto the title filter. For some reasons, the core WordPress function get_the_title() is casing the server to throw an error. In order to bypass it I have to create a new function to emulate something like the get_the_title() function.

I have since fixed all the bugs that I mentioned above and now WP-Print and WP-EMail will only work for WP2.3 and nothing below it. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.